Tire Swing
by benignmilitancy
Summary: He shrugged. "World's full of surprises."


They were sitting together on the tire swing, her on one side and him on the other, spinning until the rope creaked.

"You ever break this thing?" Gordon asked.

"More times than I can count. That's why I bolted it to the ceiling."

His gaze lifted where she pointed, squinted. "Very industrious of you."

"Why, thank you, that's exactly what I was going for."

Spin some more.

"I'm getting hungry."

"You're _always_ hungry, Gordon."

"I'm a growing boy."

"At twenty-seven?"

"Yes."

"Let go of the tire."

"No."

"Chicken." Fishing in her pocket, she offered him a ration. "Kinda stale, but they're better than nothing."

Gordon nodded and quietly accepted the pack she offered, nibbling on a cracker.

"I bet you ate crap like this all the time back at Black Mesa," she joked.

Gordon gripped the rope a moment before responding. He shook his head, his jaws slowly moving up and down as he chewed. "Fitness regulations." Silently, carefully, he swallowed, then wrapped the remainder inside its plastic covering and tucked the pack inside his own pocket. "No processed foods registered on our cards. Too unhealthy for work."

" …Oh."

Spin some more.

"You know anything about Ap Labs?" she asked.

"What labs?"

"Aperture."

"A few things. Why?"

"Just curious," she said, digging the scuffed toes of her sneakers into the dirt as she pushed. "Mossman said Black Mesa worked with them a long time ago."

"That all she said?"

"More like all I heard."

Gordon contemplated it for a good ten seconds. "Could be true."

"Really?"

"If it is, it happened before any of us were born. Once in a while you'd hear about someone trying to sue the facility over an old design patent, but we'd mostly put those down to watercooler rumors."

"Dad never mentioned them much," Alyx said, prompting him to grin in a sly manner.

"Taboo to mention them in Mesa. The A-word. I heard it got somebody canned once."

"With Breen handing out the slips? No shit. What happened to them?"

"The canned guy?"

"Yeah, Gordon, the canned guy." She socked him in the arm.

"That's the thing. Nobody knows. Aperture shut down one day and never put anything out on the market again. People said it was because their CEO died, and the labs went to the weeds after the employees quit, but… "

"But," she said, "you think there might still be other experiments out there, just… waiting for someone to discover them again."

He shrugged. "World's full of surprises."

Keep spinning.

"I've been wondering about something else, doc."

"Go ahead. I aim to educate."

"Dork. Anyway, did you really name your graduate thesis some long-ass title that basically boils down to 'my essay on how cool it is to watch lasers shoot through super dense crystals'?"

"_Observation of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Entanglement on Supraquantum Structures by Induction Through Nonlinear Transuranic Crystal of Extremely Long Wavelength Pulse from Mode-Locked Source Array._ And yes. Kind of."

"Okay," she said, "number one, that's more words than you've said in a week, and number two? Why?"

"Why not?"

"Touche."

Spin some more.

"You know what, this rope's probably gonna break again. We'd better stop before it does."

"Alyx."

"Gordon?"

" …Why did we let it get this far?" The rope stopped creaking. "For results? Administrative favor? A payraise?"

Spin, though much more slowly this time.

"I don't know, Gordon. I wish I could tell you."

They sat in silence until he said, out of the blue: "For some odd reason, those food cards worked on soda machines."

"Why?"

"Mesa's definition of 'healthy' was more function-oriented than usual."

"As long as you could push carts, right? That was all that qualified you for the job?"

He sniffed, picking a stray crumb from his beard. "Being bipedal, more like. Could have lost out to a monkey."

"It's just funny," she said. "If you hadn't applied to Black Mesa, Mossman would've gotten the job, so in a way it's kinda like… Gordon?"

"Don't say that," he said. "I wouldn't wish this on anyone."

He let go of the tire, and the world blurred at its edges.


End file.
